Harm beyond surveillance: rethinking refugees’ carcerality through the confinement continuum

This chapter argues that order to conceptualise how carceral mechanisms are enforced in refugee camps it is necessary to grasp how control over asylum seekers’ lives is exercised in other ways than through pervasive surveillance. The chapter starts by conceptualising refugees’ carcerality from the point of view of what I call the confinement continuum, formed by the entanglement of heterogenous legal, spatial and administrative measures that occlude migrants’ futurity and destructure their lives. The second section interrogates which forms of harm refugees are affected by, beyond direct tracking and surveillance: focusing on Greece, it argues that asylum seekers in camps are controlled by choking their lives – that is, by obstructing autonomous social reproduction activities and the access to socio-economic rights. It moves on by focusing on the implementation of digital technologies in camps and in the asylum system at large: it challenges the growing techno-hype in migration scholarship according to which digital technologies are mainly used for surveilling refugees, showing that, in reality, they work by hampering migrants from becoming asylum seekers. The conclusion contends that an abolitionist approach to refugee camps should challenge the techno-hype in migration research and foreground how refugees’ autonomous spaces of liveability are hampered through the intertwining of technological disruptions and carceral mechanisms.